Animal photography: how to set up your camera for expressive portraits

Using Auto ISO for animal photography

When you hear the words ‘Auto ISO’ you might imagine this is a feature designed for novices. On Nikon D-SLRs, though, it means something quite different.

It’s a way of using the lowest ISO you can get away with while still getting shutter speeds fast enough to avoid camera shake or subject movement.

It’s useful in changeable lighting conditions like these, where you may be in sunlight one minute and a darkened barn the next.

Auto ISO options
Open the Shooting menu and pick ISO sensitivity settings. Set the ISO sensitivity auto control to On, then set the maximum ISO you want and the slowest shutter speed.

Looking sheepish
The camera will then increase the ISO as far as it needs to in order to achieve this minimum speed. This picture was taken at 1/125 sec at ISO2500 – an ideal compromise between speed and quality where the camera did all the tricky calculations and all we had to do was press the shutter button.